Game of Thrones: The Eagle of Brandenburg

In 1437, the Holy Roman Empire was beset by turmoil. Emperor Sigismund lay near death, and the struggle for the throne threw all of Germany into upheaval. The Hohenzollern family had taken over the Electorate of Brandenburg barely twenty years earlier, and the land, thick with forests and marshes, remained rife with undercurrents. The foreign rulers had not earned the genuine loyalty of the local nobility. Rebellions, private wars, and urban revolts flared one after another, while powerful enemies surrounded them: the Teutonic Order to the north, Poland, and Pomerania.

The aging Elector Frederick I had placed his hopes in his eldest son, John, to govern the state. But John was lost in academia and incapable of ruling, and Brandenburg was on the brink of losing control.

The second son, Frederick Irontooth, had traveled to Poland as a boy and spent more than a decade living in a foreign land. Deeply shaped by Polish culture, he had almost become a Pole. When news of the family's crisis reached him, he was urgently summoned back to his homeland.

He possessed an iron will tempered on the battlefield, yet Brandenburg, his homeland, felt deeply unfamiliar to him. Legal succession belonged to his elder brother, but the military strength and resolve needed to keep the state alive rested with him. The local nobility's suspicion, the struggle for power between brothers, his divided identity between Germany and Poland, and the treacherous alliances and schemes among the princes all stood in his way. The returning eagle must carve a path forward for the Hohenzollern banner amid the whirlpool of power in his homeland.